1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to methods and apparatus for encoding and decoding digital data with error management schemes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Due to the explosive growth and great success of the Internet and wireless communication, as well as increasing demand for multimedia services, streaming media over the Internet and mobile/wireless channels has drawn tremendous attention. In heterogeneous Internet Protocol (IP) networks, video is provided by a server and can be streamed by one or more clients. Wired connections include dial-up, integrated services digital network (ISDN), cable, digital subscriber line protocols (collectively referred to as xDSL), fiber, local area networks (LAN), wide area networks (WAN) and others. The transmission mode can be either uni-cast or multi-cast.
Similar to the heterogeneous IP network is mobile/wireless communication. Transport of multimedia content over mobile/wireless channels is very challenging because these channels are often severely impaired due to multi-path fading, shadowing, inter-symbol interference, and noise disturbances. Some other reasons such as mobility and competing traffic also cause bandwidth variations and loss. The channel noise and the number of users being served determine the time-varying property of channel environments.
The demands of higher data rates and higher quality of service in both heterogeneous IP networks and mobile communication systems are growing rapidly. However, factors such as limited delay times, limited transmit power, limited bandwidth and multi-path fading continue to restrict the data rates handled by practical systems. In multimedia communications, particularly in error-prone environments, error resilience of the transmitted media is critical in providing the desired quality of service because errors in even a single decoded value can lead to decoding artifacts propagating spatially and temporally. Various encoding measures have been used to reduce errors while maintaining a necessary data rate, however all of these techniques suffer from problems with errors arriving at the decoder side.
Through the use of a source encoder, data is compressed—conveying the maximum information by expending the minimum number of bits, followed by a channel encoder that tends to maximize the capacity of the transmission channel for a given probability of error in receiving these bits.
Channel coding, for example, Reed-Solomon coding, is used to improve the robustness of the source-coded data. Joint source-channel coding methodologies have been used to provide varying levels of error protection to source coded data with varying levels of importance or to enable rate adaptation of coded video data to available network bandwidth through partitioning and dropping packets. This is because the common transport protocols do not deliver corrupted data to the source decoder.
Source coding techniques such as reversible variable length coding (e.g. in MPEG-4) have been used for error recovery by decoding the packet in the reverse order when corrupt packets are in fact received. There is a compromise in coding efficiency with source coding techniques, which translates to quality of decoded video for a given bit rate.
Hybrid coding standards, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (collectively referred to as MPEG-x), H.261, H.262, H.263, and H.264 (collectively referred to as H.26x), use resynchronization points in the bitstream as the main method of handling errors at the decoder.
Another reason that can cause data loss in excess of the initial corruption is due to incorrect codeword emulation. The identification of the initial bit error position is not a trivial task and typically is not possible without a special design supporting the identification of bit error positions in a MAC layer or physical layer component. Hence, upon detecting bitstream corruption, the decoder may have to stop decoding and move forward in the bitstream to find the next resynchronization point, and in the process necessarily skipping a sizeable amount of potentially healthy data. Although emulation of a different codeword, which is the same length as the original, i.e. authentic, codeword might seem to be less of a problem with respect to the sequence of events described above, this is actually not the case. There are many ways in which this kind of an error may lead to failures in a decoder's correct bitstream interpretation. For example, in most current codecs there are objects in the bitstream (compression related parameters) whose values influence the syntax of the following portion of the bitstream. Hence, an incorrect value for such an object can lead to an incorrect bitstream interpretation.
Due to the variable packet lengths commonly used in the hybrid coding standards, information necessary for decoding the variable lengths packets (e.g., packet lengths and/or synchronization information) must be transmitted to the decoding apparatus in order to properly decode the bitstream. Because the common transport protocols rely on various layers of header information (e.g., transport layer headers and/or synchronization layer headers) to deliver this necessary variable packet length and/or synchronization information, the source decoder has a limited ability to handle an erroneous bitstream, with dropping of packets and resynchronization being the most common solution. An improved method of handling bit errors that lead to error propagation and data loss due to problems such as synchronization loss and incorrect codeword emulation, is needed.